Morality in an Immoral Geography

"To keep 3.5-million people under occupation is bad for us and bad for them. I want to say clearly that I have come to the conclusion that we have to reach an agreement."
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

Both his sentiments and his actions throughout his life, attempting to do what was right for the country and the nation that he was part of and loved, will live on long after he has died. And he is now in the final process of doing just that. It has taken him eight long years of artificial life support in reflection of his status as an orthodox Jew, allowing death to naturally overtake life, without giving the advantage to welcoming death in his singular voyage to oblivion.

"If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all", he said. And so, he agreed to surrender part of the Judaic geographical heritage of the ancient holy land of Judea and Samaria in favour of retaining and protecting that part of Israel that could be defended as a Jewish state welcoming the Jews of the diaspora as their haven in the world forever opposed to their
presence.

His experiment with the Gaza Strip, withdrawing all Israeli military, uprooting thousands of settlers by force, and leaving the strip to the Palestinian Gazan Arabs to self-administer was a profound lesson in disappointed failure. Even millions spent by Jewish philanthropists to leave behind the skeleton structure of a flourishing greenhouse business for the Palestinians to take possession of and initiate with it their own success in agriculture was trashed by vengefully destructive Arabs.

Gaza was an experiment that might have and should have resulted in an active demonstration of pride and determination, where Palestinians could have mandated themselves to become responsible for themselves, to assemble their own infrastructure for administering the territory. Instead it descended into the rule of the jungle with competing tribal animosities leading to lawlessness and predation on the vulnerable in the society.

It was rescued from its most violent excesses consuming itself by the advent of Hamas, the Islamist ideological-political militia whose charter expressed its purpose of destroying the State of Israel and restoring the geography in total to the Palestinians. Hamas was created as an offshoot of the larger, longer established Muslim Brotherhood which had tentacles throughout the Middle East as a throwback Islamist movement gaining support from the impoverished through its social programs.

The entrance of Israel into a geography until then, in modern times, dedicated to Islam, the late-comer in the so-called Abrahamic trinity of monotheistic tradition, earned an instant backlash of violent intervention from the entire Muslim community of nations. Nowhere else in the world had a small country of several million ethnics to defend themselves from a conglomeration of war-hungry destroyers.

The Palestinian tradition of vengeance and victimhood has never since muted itself to reasonable accommodation.

The Arab birthrate mitigated against Israel expanding and keeping its defensive-war-geographic gains. It would translate inevitably toward a powerful but small military exerting all its capability in perpetuity toward preventing a growing geographic majority of Arab Muslims from attacking the minority administration viewed as oppressive occupiers. Ariel Sharon's view of Israel was not that of a prospective occupier in perpetuity. He accurately reasoned that morally it would despoil Israel's democratic order.

And that to preserve Israel's idealism as a national protective state for world Jewry, along with its democratic order, Israel would have to sacrifice its dreams of a greater territorial expansion equal to its antique presence in the Middle East. And of course, this decision is the direct opposite of what all the other countries of the Middle East represent themselves as. Where minority Sunnis rule majority Shias, and the reverse; each loathing the other with fearsome hatred.

The meltdown of social order, cultural and religious civility in countries of the Middle East that had seen a backlash from those who were conventionally and traditionally sidelined has led to a total breakdown of order and an introduction to the horrible excesses of human nature at its brutal worst, with sectarian and tribal violence of a nature nightmares are made of. Tradition in tribal societies such as these has no respect for reason or forgiveness; they are signs of weakness.

Force is evidence of the honour of tribal mentalities and cultural traditions. And jihad, the way of the sword, and more latterly suicide-martyr bombings represents the highway toward hard-earned victory and a return, in the minds of the slaughter-obsessed, to the former glory days of early Islam, when the Caliphate ruled believers and non-believers alike, all subservient to the will of Allah.

The question here is how a rational society of responsible citizens who have extended equality and citizenship to people who are resident within Israel who are not Jewish, but Arab and Druze, Muslim and Christian and of many other origins and ethnic groups, will be able to live in any semblance of safe harmony with neighbours for whom constant conflict is the norm?

Israel is a country whose parliament (Knesset) has within it elected Arab members of the Knesset, who stand in solidarity with their Palestinian Arab brethren in the West Bank and Gaza, but who refuse outright to surrender their Israeli citizenship and adapt themselves to the practical carving out of Arab-dominated areas of Israel for transfer to the greater Palestinian nascent state.

Illogic and inconstancy rule the day.